U.S. Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne holds a young Dunlin shorebird after taking a test sample from the bird, Tuesday, Aug. 29, 2006, in Barrow, Ala. Hundreds of miles above the Arctic Circle, biologists working in the frosty marshes of Alaska's North Slope are keeping a lookout for migratory birds that might bring a deadly avian flu strain to the United States. (AP Photo/Joseph Herbert)

Photo: JOSEF HEBERT

U.S. Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne holds a young Dunlin...

New policy on national parks expected to favor conservation / Today's notice said to contain few concessions to recreation industry

Ending a yearlong debate over its management and guiding philosophy, the National Park Service was to adopt today a policy emphasizing conservation of natural and cultural resources over recreation when they are in conflict.

Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne is expected to announce the new policy in Washington today.

The new park-management regulations give barely a nod to most of the concerns of the recreation industry and its congressional champion, Rep. Steve Pearce, R-N.M., while rejecting the most important revisions the industry sought.

The park service would not comment on the policy until it is made final but a draft of the policy was provided to the New York Times by a group favoring the conservation framework. It makes a few concessions to the recreation industry, like ensuring that so-called gateway communities -- close neighbors to the large national parks that draw tens of thousands of tourists each year -- have a role in park managers' decision making.

Related Stories

But it generally rejects earlier proposals that would have paved the way for increased use of snowmobiles, off-road vehicles and personal watercraft. Commercial activities like mining and cell-phone tower construction, which would have been easier under the suggested revisions of a year ago, will continue to face the same high hurdles they have in the past.

Laura Loomis, a policy analyst for the National Parks Conservation Association, said, "The new draft gives much greater guidance on what constitutes an appropriate use and what constitutes an inappropriate use of the parks." She said the current draft restores the park service's ability to push the Environmental Protection Agency to act when pollution -- often emanating from industrial and power plants -- fouled park air.

In this respect, as in many others, including the emphasis on conservation, the final policy echoes the policy in effect at the end of the Clinton administration.

In an e-mail, Andrea Keller, the spokeswoman for the conservation association, said the regulations to be signed this week "reinforce the agency's commitment to protect park resources such as air quality, and ensure that visitors this year and for generations to come will be welcomed to our parks and offered a memorable, inspiring experience."

After five years of aggressive, and often successful, industry lobbying on issues from park management policies to the interpretation of the Endangered Species Act to the expansion of oil and gas drilling across the Rocky Mountain West to livestock grazing policies, Kempthorne's rejection of the more industry-friendly draft policies turned heads among both environmentalists and industry groups.

It remains unclear, however, whether the new secretary who replaced Gale Norton is considering changing course on any of these other issues.

Derrick Crandall, president of the American Recreation Coalition, was conciliatory in his comments on the new regulations, and cautioned that he had not seen the final draft.

"In this world in politics you rarely get 100 percent victories," Crandall said. "We are convinced our concerns were looked at, some changes have been made and we're prepared to work with the agency to move to other kinds of important issues."

Among such concerns, he said, had been the role of gateway communities like West Yellowstone, Mont., which has a large snowmobile industry, in the formulation of policies for particular parks.

In a July letter to the outgoing park service director, Fran Mainella, Larry E. Smith, president of Americans for Responsible Recreational Access, wrote, "Trying to accommodate the existing generation of Americans should be as worthy a goal as is preserving our parks for future generations."

Both Smith and Crandall have questioned whether a slow but steady decline in park visitors in the past decade or so can be attributed in part to the failure of parks to provide certain kinds of recreation, like trails for off-road vehicles, to visitors.

But park service statisticians say the comparative numbers are flawed, since their methodology was changed about 18 years ago.

The overall number of visitors to the park system peaked at 287 million in 1999.

Park service management policies are drawn from congressional directives, case law and the 1916 Organic Act, and have afforded parks the highest level of natural resource protection of any federally managed land. The policies instruct park service officials to balance visitor use with wildlife needs, resource protection and historic preservation, generally holding protection and preservation as their highest goals.